


The Other Side of the Door

by daphnaea



Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: Disney Movies, Established Relationship, Long-Distance Relationship, M/M, Post-Canon, Ronan Lynch-level swearing, not actually a crossover
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-27
Updated: 2018-07-27
Packaged: 2019-06-17 01:36:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,387
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15450483
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/daphnaea/pseuds/daphnaea
Summary: It was all the fucking Walt Disney Corporation’s fault, Ronan told himself. Fuck that weasel-nosed mouse asshole and all his limp-dicked heteronormative reactionary pencil-pushers. And fuck Pixar and their fucking Cheng-style hair-fluffing algorithms and their fucking sentimental bullshit.Pynch Week Day 5 - Fandom Crossover





	The Other Side of the Door

It was all the fucking Walt Disney Corporation’s fault, Ronan told himself. Fuck that weasel-nosed mouse asshole and all his limp-dicked heteronormative reactionary pencil-pushers. And fuck Pixar and their fucking Cheng-style hair-fluffing algorithms and their fucking sentimental bullshit.

And fine, all right, it was sort of Opal’s fault too, but it would never have happened if that fucking movie hadn’t put the idea in her innocent little head, causing her to latch onto it like a really fucking determined limpet.

And it was a little bit Ronan’s fault, because of course he’d fucking _wanted_ it, wanted it enough to dream it again and again until it worked, and now here it was and he was fucked.

Because Adam wasn’t going to want it at all.

***

It had all started back in the early days of Opal’s residence at the Barns, when Blue had suggested showing her Disney movies as a way of introducing her to American culture and giving her some shared reference points with the hordes of little cousins she sometimes encountered at Fox Way.

Blue brought over _The Little Mermaid_ , which Opal took to instantly and which caused her to permanently refer to forks as dinglehoppers. The project nearly ran aground after _Fantasia_ , which was too much like the dream world and gave Opal nightmares for a month, but then Blue produced _Aladdin_ , which made Opal believe that Ronan was related to the Genie because dreaming and wish-granting were “the same type of magic.”

But the actual problem was _Monsters, Inc._

“Dream us a door to Adam’s room,” Opal had demanded immediately upon the conclusion of the movie. It was March of Adam’s freshman year of college, and Opal had not adapted well to the separation this entailed. She had an odd sense of time and limited patience with aspects of the human world that didn’t make sense to her, such as higher education.

“That’s a fucking made up movie, brat. The doors aren’t real.”

“It would be real if you dreamed it,” she said mutinously.

“I can’t.”

“Try!”

Ronan’s jaw clenched as he tried to think of a way to explain that Adam wouldn’t want that without sending her into a fit. “Look, Adam’s school is really hard. He’s busy with homework and study groups and his job and all kinds of shit. He can’t have us just showing up there all the time and distracting him.”

“He could come here when he’s done with his homework then, like he used to,” she said.

Ronan could not think of an adequate rebuttal so he just left the room and went to lock himself in his dreaming barn. He did not dream of a magic doorway that day, and he hoped that would be the end of it.

But Opal didn’t let it go. “Family means no one gets left behind or forgotten,” she said, after watching _Lilo & Stitch._ “Our family is small and broken but still good, and Adam is part of it. If you dreamed the door, our family could be together again. We can’t leave Adam behind.”

“Adam left _us_ behind, brat,” Ronan snapped before he could stop himself. “He _wants_ to be far away.”

“But he isn’t the one who can dream the door,” Opal pointed out, stamping a hoof. “How will he know he’s our family if we don’t bring him back?”

That night, Ronan did dream a door, but it was for shit. He didn’t clearly remember what the door to Adam’s dorm room closet looked like, and even in the dream the rules for what the door was supposed to open onto when didn’t make sense to him.

He burned the result in the morning.

He didn’t want to think about it, but he did. He thought about being able to see Adam every day, to kiss him, to make sure he didn’t skip too many meals, to make him deal with Opal when she got out of hand and she and Ronan just ended up shouting at each other for days.

He also thought about having Adam’s roommate tumble into the Barns when he was looking for a clean shirt. He thought about the possibility that there were things that happened in that dorm room that Adam wouldn’t want him to see.

It wouldn’t work. There was no way to make it work.

In a dorm.

It was over a week before Ronan hit on a scenario that would work: two doors that always opened onto each other, one in a locked barn, one in a locked apartment near Adam’s campus.

After he thought of it, he wished he hadn’t, because knowing it would work meant knowing he _could_ have it, if things were different.

If Adam wanted it too.

Ronan knew that Adam wanted to be with him. In the future. Over breaks. They had fucking plans together, solid plans, contingency plans, and Ronan knew Adam was serious about them. But Adam wasn’t like Ronan - he chopped himself and his life into pieces and kept them in neat boxes, and Ronan wasn’t part of Adam’s college existence.

When he dropped Adam off on campus after Thanksgiving break, even the weeks between then and Christmas had seemed too long to bear.

“Maybe I’ll just hop in the car and surprise you one of these days,” he’d murmured to Adam between kisses.

Adam’s face lit up for a second and then shut down as if he’d remembered something unpleasant. “Don’t,” he said. “I’m serious, I don’t want that. You’re welcome any time, but call or text first, okay? Don’t just show up.”

“Sure asshole, whatever,” he said, and spent the drive back to Virginia reminding himself that Adam liked to keep the pieces of his life separate, like food on a picky child’s plate. That it wasn’t about Ronan specifically, or how much or little Adam cared about him or missed him.

He did suggest an impromptu visit, once. He called Adam with his keys already in his hand, but Adam was somewhere loud, surrounded by laughter, and said sorry he’d already left on a weekend trip to do some extra-curricular research with his friends.

This was indisputably a valid excuse, but Ronan didn’t ask again, and Adam never invited him up for a last-minute trip, so they saw each other only at proscribed college vacations.

Spring break was over now, and summer impossibly far away, and if he dreamed the doors (and rented an apartment and installed a door there, and and and) then he could see Adam _every day._

But.

Adam didn’t like disruption. He texted Ronan in the mornings between breakfast and class and in the evenings between studying and hanging out with his friends, and he called Ronan twice a week, reliably. He would reply to Ronan’s texts at other times, if he wasn’t in class or at the bonus lectures he liked to go to in his free time because he was a fucking nerd, but still.

Ronan told himself all this was because Adam was anal as fuck and in love with his goddamn scheduler, and not necessarily because he didn’t think about Ronan or miss him except when his calendar told him to. Or because another person was taking up the rest of his days, someone he might find out about if he video-chatted at the wrong time or showed up to visit without advance warning.

Usually, in his head, when he thought about walking through a magic door into Adam’s room, the person in Adam’s bed looked like Blue except fancier. Sometimes, like Gansey except less human. Sometimes he tried to talk himself into feeling like it wouldn’t be that bad. His father had loved his mother, but it hadn’t stopped him from straying. Not everyone had the same fucking rules or hangups or whatever that Ronan did. And for Adam - who had been wanted so little in his life and who was now, after over a year of proper meals, undeniably hot - turning down someone who pursued him must feel like squandering a precious resource. The distance, the time apart was harder for both of them than they’d thought it would be. And he and Adam coped with difficulty in different ways.

***

Ronan dreamed the doors in April. They were a matched, embarrassing set, with a Transformer in robot form on Adam’s door and car form on Ronan’s door. They worked perfectly. No matter where either of them were, if you walked through one you exited through the other.

He didn’t tell Adam or Opal about them. The reasonable thing would be to sell Adam on the concept over the summer, without the strain of distance and Adam’s school-related stress between them. It was too late to plausibly deploy them this year anyway.

But patience and practicality were not Ronan’s strong suits, and Ronan began dreaming, sometimes, of a Cabeswater full of doors, and on the other side of each one was an Adam who didn’t want him in a different way - angry Adams and cold ones, unfaithful Adams and contemptuous ones. He would wake up and scroll through the history of his text messages with Adam, days and weeks and months of daily trivia and ridiculous photos and affectionate insults, and he would tell himself that next year they could use the doors, but he wasn’t sure if he believed it.

Then Adam cancelled one of their regular calls and couldn’t reschedule it for two days, and by the time they finally did talk, Ronan couldn’t keep his goddamn mouth shut anymore.

“Do you like that your school is so far away from Henrietta?” he demanded, after the bare minimum of catch-up pleasantries had been exchanged.

It was a video call, and Ronan had dreamed both of them phones with excellent screens, so he got to see Adam’s face screw up in defensive wariness in high definition.

“You know I love it here,” he said.

Ronan let out a frustrated noise. “No, do you like that it’s so far from _me._ I mean, next year, if I could be up by you more often, like potentially _a lot_ more often, would you want that?”

Adam frowned at him. “But what about the Barns? What are you thinking of doing?”

“Just answer the fucking question. Would you want me close by or not?”

“Why wouldn’t I?” Adam asked.

Ronan barked a humorless laugh. “Because you have a whole separate fucking life at college that I’m not supposed to be part of? I mean, that’s why I’m not allowed to come up for surprise visits, right? That’s why I only hear from you in the pre-scheduled ten minutes per day you’ve allotted to our relationship.”

Adam recoiled from the phone screen as if he’d been slapped. “I -” he said, and then stopped.

“Fuck it,” Ronan said, calmed somehow by the obvious anguish on his face. “Look, I’m not trying to be an asshole, I just need to know, all right? I get that I’m not part of the Adam Parrish College Experience, that’s fine, you’re doing your own shit, but how often would you want me there, if you could choose? Once a week? Once a month? Less than that?”

“Every day,” he said, in a voice so choked Ronan had to ask him to repeat himself.

Even after he did, Ronan shook his head. “You don’t mean that,” he said, “not really. Fucking think about it, I’d be in the way, I’d distract you from your work, I’d scare half your friends and piss off the other half, fucking Chainsaw would shit on your homework.”

“Ronan,” he said, lifting a hand helplessly as if he would reach through the screen and wipe the doubt off Ronan’s face. “The reason I told you not to come for surprise visits is because if I thought you might just show up out of the blue, I’d be thinking about it all the time, I’d be disappointed every time I got back to my dorm and you weren’t there waiting for me, I’d be looking for you everywhere, and I didn’t want to drive myself crazy like that. The reason I only text you twice a day is because if I didn’t make a rule for myself I’d be texting you all the time and you hate your phone, it would be too much.”

“It wouldn’t be too much if it was you,” Ronan muttered, unable to look squarely at Adam’s image, having lost his emotional footing entirely and not knowing what to do with the flood of relief so strong it felt like pain.

“Of course I want you here, dumbass,” Adam said, his voice horrible and gentle now, seeing something in Ronan’s face that he wished he could hide. “I want you here all the time. But it wouldn’t be fair of me to ask.”

Ronan scrubbed at his face. “You could ask sometimes,” he said. “You could ask me to be there tonight.”

“Come see me, then,” Adam said. “Come be here tonight.”

“Okay,” Ronan. “See you soon, loser.”

***

That night, tangled up in Adam’s narrow bed, clothed now, his roommate snoring from the other side of the room, Ronan said into his neck, “I know it’s not as easy as all that, but I wish you’d tell me what you want. Even if it’s too much, even if it can’t really happen, even if you don’t want me to do anything about it. It’s never too much to _say_ it.”

“I want _this,_ ” Adam murmured, wrapping himself even more thoroughly around Ronan. “I want it all the time. When I’m here and you’re far away it’s like being hungry with no food anywhere in the whole state.”

Ronan smiled against his skin. “How would you feel about living off campus next year?”

“What?” Adam asked. “Why?”

Ronan sighed. “Did you ever see the movie _Monsters, Inc.?_ ”

***

When Ronan picked Opal up from Fox Way two days later, she was vibrating with excitement. “Dream me fairy dust!” she demanded immediately. “I want to fly like Chainsaw!”

Apparently they’d just finished watching _Peter Pan._

Ronan hoped that at whatever the fuck part of South America Blue was traipsing around in right then, she knew that somewhere far away, Ronan hated her and all her terrible fucking ideas very, very much indeed.


End file.
